I take a few shots during the day and at night I post them on Miskan.com. What you don’t see though is how the pictures looked before right out of the camera. I shoot everything in RAW format which basically means the pictures are stored on my memory card unaltered. The pictures aren’t compressed in any way, no white balance is applied, no sharpening, no nothing. Its pure. When I open up the pictures in Photoshop, I have to set up the Raw options before the picture opens up. Its basically a window where I can control various aspects of the picture from brightness and contrast, to exposure and the white balance. It time consuming since I have to open each image and post process it till it looks good. Each one of my raw files are also over 5MB (on older cameras they are twice the size). The advantage is I get to control the settings, not the camera. Most of my pictures are usually shot under exposed because you can always brighten a picture but you can’t darken an over exposed shot. Shooting in RAW also means I am now more picky with my shots, I don’t want to get home and have 50 pictures I need to open and adjust one by one. I just don’t have the time for it nor the computer processing speed to do it quickly. Below is a shot I just took now in the office to give you an example of the importance of post processing.
In this first picture you can clearly see the white’s are grayish, the floor is dull and the whole picture lacks decent contrast.
This picture is the first one but it’s been post processed. I increased the brightness, contrast, a bit of saturation, set the white balance to neon and then proceeded to manually set the white balance till it contained a decent amount of magenta.
So in conclusion, don’t expect to get good pictures if you don’t post process. Remember when in university you took photography? Remember how in the dark you spent time experimenting trying to get the right contrast and shadows etc.. this is the same thing. If you don’t do it right don’t expect excellent results.
update: I think from now on whenever there is a cool shot I upload onto Miskan.com I will post the original unprocessed one here just to show the importance of post processing.
4 replies on “Post Processing”
thanks man! i’ve been waiting for more information on that! write more about photo processing when you get the time, it’s very interesting…
didn’t think anyone would be interested. What I will do maybe in the next few days is post a step by step process of what I did to a picture so that it became acceptable to post online. I will have screenshots and detailed instructions. Should be cool..
and there is us , lazy people , taking pictues and uploading it to flicker asap 😛
ya it’s really cool to know more about “behind the scenes” of photo post-processing.
i wud luv to read your tutorial on it…
am waitin’ anxiously… get it online fast 😉